Chinatown, in the photographers’ eye

1of2Charles Wong’s “Our Treasure” captures a young couple in 1952 in Chinatown. “The whole concept of Chinese New Year is in this image,” Wong says.Photo: Charles Wong

2of2“Lion’s Heart” (2015) is one of two images in the exhibition by Vietnamese American photographer Vincent Trinh, who first saw Chinatown in 2005.Photo: Vincent Trinh

Commercial Street, an alley that runs between Sansome Street and Grant Avenue in San Francisco, has seen its share of history. So it came as a fitting surprise to stumble into one of the small boutiques there this week and find a rigorous exhibition of Chinatown photography over the course of the last century. “How Now Chinatown: Seven Photographers,” may be in Legion, a cute clothing boutique, but don’t be fooled — this is the type of show that would be in a downtown gallery if there were any of those left in San Francisco.

I went back the next day with Charles Wong and Irene Poon, two of the photographers in the show. Wong, 93, and Poon, 74, are Chinatown natives and frequent collaborators (the well-known photographer Imogen Cunningham introduced Poon to Wong’s work). They’ve had their photos shown all over the country, but they still both shoot on the street in Chinatown.

“You can never really leave your home place, so to speak,” Poon said.

“When we were growing up here, Chinatown was an undeclared ghetto,” Wong said. “We could only own property within the boundaries of certain streets. So everything was very closed, very close, very cramped.”

“We all knew each other, that’s for sure,” Poon said. “When the real estate laws started to loosen up after World War II, my family moved one block outside of the boundaries, to Clay and Mason. Just one street out. But it was so different; it felt open.”

“Virginia” (1965) is an image by Irene Poon, who still shoots in Chinatown although she now lives in Miraloma Park. “You can never really leave your home place, so to speak,” Poon says.

Photo: Irene Poon

“Jailbreak!” laughed Wong.

Although leaving the neighborhood — Wong now lives in Pacific Heights, Poon in Miraloma Park — allowed them to study photography, they used those skills to beautifully document their old haunts.

I asked Wong to tell me about “Our Treasure,” one of his photos in the show. Taken in 1952, it shows a dapper young couple strutting downhill next to a row of big-bodied American cars, all smiles as they clutch the plants and flowers they’ve just bought.

“I took it about 30 feet away,” Wong said. “They looked fabulous, and I couldn’t get over how satisfied she was with her quince. The gentleman’s looking at his plant — he’s thinking about putting it in a porcelain pot. It’ll grow the next year and the year after that. He’s looking at the future, and she’s thinking about how her flower’s going to bloom the next day. The whole concept of Chinese New Year is in this image.”

“I’m not as good about talking about my photos,” Poon said.

“Tell me what you like to shoot,” I said.

“People, always people,” she said.

Later on, I asked her how she thought Chinatown had changed. She said, “The change I miss the most is the closeness of families here. I don’t see that anymore.”

I’ll be so bold as to suggest that generational change is a theme in Poon’s photography.

Another big change in Chinatown that both Wong and Poon mentioned was the influx of immigrants from other parts of Asia. After the U.S. changed its exclusionary immigration policies in the mid-1960s, immigrants from other Asian countries moved into the neighborhood, established businesses and started families.

One of the eventual beneficiaries of this policy change was Vincent Trinh, another one of the photographers in the show. Trinh is a 29-year-old Vietnamese American who was born in an Indonesian refugee camp and first saw San Francisco’s Chinatown in 2005.

Trinh, too, always photographs people. His two photos in “How Now” were both taken in 2015, and I asked him why he likes to shoot in the neighborhood.

As may be expected, his answer was very different from what Wong and Poon see.

“The greatest thing about Chinatown is that, even as it’s surrounded by these intense changes on all sides, it looks the same as it did 10 years ago,” Trinh said. “Every time I go to Chinatown, the buildings are the same, the memories are the same, the architecture, the language; there’s a holistic community that you don’t find in other parts of San Francisco. It still has traditions. I’m hoping to preserve those moments through my photos.”

Caille Millner is Deputy Opinion Editor and a Datebook columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle. On the editorial board, she edits op-eds and writes on a wide range of topics including business, finance, technology, education and local politics. For Datebook, she writes a weekly column on Bay Area life and culture. She is the author of “The Golden Road: Notes on My Gentrification” (Penguin Press), a memoir about growing up in the Bay Area. She is also the recipient of the Scripps-Howard Foundation’s Walker Stone Award in Editorial Writing and the Society of Professional Journalists’ Editorial Writing Award.